Yahoo’s Flickr, which has been around for 11 years, just had a major upgrade transforming it from an also-ran service to the best cloud-based photo storage and sharing service, though with some privacy concerns.

That’s the first time in years that I’ve used “Yahoo” and “best” in the same sentence.

For no cost, Flickr now lets you store a terabyte of photos. That’s 1,000 gigabytes, or enough to store about a half-million pictures. I’m a pretty prolific photographer and I only have about 50,000 pictures in my library. With that much free photo storage, there’s no need to pay to store photos on cloud services like Dropbox.

Flickr stores full, uncompressed images and allows you to download them back to a computer or other device if necessary. That’s reassuring because if anything were to happen to your computer or an in-house backup, photos are one of the few types of digital files that you can’t replace.

Flickr isn’t the only service that offers massive amounts of photo storage. Apple will sell you a terabyte of storage for $20 a month. Amazon offers unlimited photo storage, but only to Prime users who pay $99 a year for a bundle of services including video and audio streaming and free two-day shipping. Google counts any photos bigger than 2048×2048 pixels against your storage limit and Dropbox, Sugarsync, Microsoft OneDrive and other cloud storage systems don’t give you a break for storing pictures.

While storage is great, the real magic of the new Flickr 4.0 is its image-recognition software. Once your photos are uploaded, the cloud-based software attempts to recognize them based on their content so that they can be searched for, organized and sorted accordingly. If I search for “wedding” on Flickr.com, I’ll find all the pictures of a wedding I attended a few years ago. That marriage is already over, but the pictures could be online forever. I’m not exactly sure how it accomplishes this feat but I suspect the software knows what wedding pictures usually look like and tags them accordingly.

The software is also able to recognize members of my family — If I search for “Will,” I get hundreds of pictures of my son. It can also find animals — A search for “cat” finds pictures of our late feline family members, while “dog” brings up my furry friend Yuri and our dearly departed Shaggy.

By default, Flickr’s site displays your photos by date, but you can select “Magic View” and have it display them by category, such as animal, architecture, food, landscape, people, plant, style, vehicle and more. When I selected “electronics,” I was inundated with pictures of computers, phones, printers and other devices that I’ve taken at trade shows or when reviewing products. Almost none of these are worth keeping, so I easily deleted them from Flickr, though they’re still on my computer’s hard drive.

I can’t overemphasize how cool it is to be able to see pictures by category. I had long forgotten about the pictures I’ve taken on nature walks, but they popped up when I looked at images of “plants.” When I looked at animals, I not only got to reminisce about departed pets, but found a 2008 picture I took of two “love birds” seemingly kissing, which I shared with my Facebook friends. When I clicked on “vehicle,” Flickr broke them down by airplane, bike, boat, car, train, truck and “other,” which let me review all sorts of old bike ride photos along with my helicopter ride in Alaska.

Flickr also provides photo-editing features including cropping, adjusting brightness, adding special effects or text and more. It’s not exactly Photoshop, but it’s adequate for most users.

While I love the auto-tagging feature, there are some who will find it objectionable. Mashable reported on a “backlash” to the upgrade with a link to 1,500-plus comments on Flickr’s blog post about the tagging feature, with some complaining that the auto-tagging is inaccurate and others simply saying that they prefer to do their own tagging.

Of course there are privacy issues if a tagged photo is accessible to others. Geolocation tagging (which is common across photo sharing services), for example, can reveal where you took the picture, which may not be something you want to share. In an update to its post, the Flickr staff promised to add batch-editing capabilities that will make it easier to change or remove tags.

When I look at services like Flickr, I can’t help but imagine what’s next, and it’s pretty clear to me that we’re moving toward a day when every picture we take can be run against a database of known images to identify exactly who is in it — even if they are a stranger to us — and exactly where they were located. That’s very cool technology but it comes with plenty of baggage, which is one of the reasons why regulators in DC are keeping a close eye on how companies are using image-recognition technology.

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